This one won’t be for the faint-hearted as Wright explained: “You know you’re in for a really tough game because Kevin is going to try and rough you up a bit so you have to try and rough him up a bit in return.

“But he’s good whenever the ball is in the air, he can hold it and bring other players into the game.

“Even when he was a team-mate here you discovered he’s not shy or quiet but he’s a good lad. He’s a big honest boy who will give the team his all every time.

“And he can give you a hard time even if you’re a team-mate. He lets you know if he doesn’t think you’ve done something correct.

“That can be a good thing or a bad thing and it must be done the right way. If you dish it out you’ve got to be on form yourself and you need to be able to take it too, and to be fair to him he was able to be like that. He’s always got something to say during the games as well and I’ll find out in this game if he’s the same with his opponents as he was with us.”

When Kyle was at Rugby Park it seemed Killie’s sole tactic was to launch the ball forward and hope the big striker could do something with it. Wright admitted having him up front on his own wasn’t always ideal.

He said: “Hearts seem to be going pretty well and I see that Rudi Skacel is back and has scored their last four goals. He looks the type to run on to big Kevin’s flick-ons and I don’t know if we quite used Kevin for that job very well last season.

“We were at the wrong end of the table, the heads were down a bit. And maybe the boys weren’t making the runs but we didn’t really find a partner to work well off Kevin for any length of time. We were just lumping balls up to him.”

Now if the Killie defenders tried the same thing they would be likely to get a blast from boss Mixu Paatelainen, above, who insists they play the ball on the deck.

“He wants us to be direct, trying to get it up to the strikers as fast as we can but we do it by passing the ball and if he catches you punting the ball long for the sake of it he isn’t happy,” said Wright.

“He understands, of course, that every now and again you need to clear your lines under pressure but he wants it on the deck.”